The present invention relates to a program construction assisting system for assisting in constructing business application programs.
Many business application programs used in business computers have been composed of such basic processes as the input, processing, and output of data records. For example, a billing process is composed of the following processes:
Inputting slip data from an input/display unit such as a keyboard or a CRT PA1 Processing data records on memory PA1 Updating data records into data files PA1 Printing data records on an output unit such as a printer PA1 Inputting retrieval conditions from an input/display unit PA1 Retrieving the data record from a data file PA1 Displaying data records on a display unit PA1 Correcting the relevant data record PA1 Processing data records on memory PA1 Updating data records into data files PA1 Inputting retrieval conditions from an input unit PA1 Retrieving the data record from a data file PA1 Processing data records on memory PA1 Printing data records on a printing unit
Furthermore, for example, a master maintenance process is composed of the following processes:
Moreover, for example, a ledger printing process is composed of the following processes:
As described above, the processing of a business application program is basically a series of processes of transferring various types of data records.
What sets those data transfer processes is a business application program construction tool.
In conventional business application program construction tools, however, since the aforementioned processing steps were written in text form, for example, in the C language or the BASIC language, or in table form (various types of database tool), even SEs (system engineers), designers, had the difficulty of grasping the whole picture of the data flow concerning how the data were generated, processed, and outputted.
In recent years, there have been appeared business application program construction tools which visually modularize files or screen data processing and represent the connection between modules by connecting them with lines. Many of such construction tools have represented only the flow of data, making it difficult to accurately grasp the contents of the definition of a data record, an interface between modules, or the contents of data changing with time.